Distilleries

The worlds largest distilleries rely on Wonderware to help manage production, covering all the various operations, from Mash Tun to Worts Cooler through Wash Back to Stills and Spirit Handling covering the whole process of Mashing, Fermentation, Wash Distillation, Spirit Distillation and cask filling operations right through to the final bottling of their Whisky. Distillers face many different challenges, such as ensuring product uniformity and repeatable quality, adherence to environmental licenses for water abstraction and to always retain the particular characteristics of the product.

A distillery has to balance some very important variables during what is usually a continuous 24×7 operation. For each of the mashes the primary concern is for repeatability that makes a distiller’s product what it is, including its exact % alcoholic content, and also keeping an eye on the manufacturing performance indicators of yield and productivity.

Modern plant schemes involve energy recovery from condensed steam; this and other energy and environmental issues can be readily incorporated into a Wonderware solution. Wonderware Historian is the perfect tool to automate mandatory reports for water abstraction license compliance to SEPA (Scotland) and the Environmental Agency (England and Wales).

Wonderware solutions will monitor and control events and quality in real-time, allowing the distiller to concentre on the finer issues rather than trying to monitor everything in the plant. Detailed information leads to improved product consistency and as well as performance (such as an increase in the number of mashes per period), and brings the opportunity to automate batches for consistent quality and accurate ‘to plan’ production times, with everything being recorded as it happens for full and detailed reporting.

Deployed on Wonderware System Platform, built on ArchestrA technology – Wonderware Distillery solutions enable ‘perfect mashes’, increased agility through shorter setup times and faster replenishment as well as improved OEE.

Key Benefits

Assured customer satisfaction through consistency and uniformity of products

Intuitive operator displays

Compliance with regulatory frameworks for hygiene and easy access to traceability information

Standards-based Integration to existing ERP business systems

Scalable functionality so that a solution can be deployed to suit your particular business

Factory wide energy data which is linked to process and batch data for energy reduction programmes.